Menand writes essays. This book is a compilation of detailed essays on certain individuals and certain intellectual movements before and during the Cold War. Menand has the gift, a remarkable one, of being able to explain—to explain almost anything. He deftly opens up the complex inner workings of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism; the assumptions and mode of analysis embodied by structuralism; the troubled reasoning behind Isaiah Berlin's two views of freedom; and the “niche marketing” of The New Yorker magazine, by which its “culturally insecure” readers could be reassured that they were liking the right things for the right reasons and that “any culture worth having could be had without special aesthetic equipment or intellectual equipment.” A New Yorker staff writer himself, one gifted with capacious range and curiosity, he is also aware of the taste and sensibility of his reading audience. But since his book comes with no abiding thesis, each of these essays, when housed in a book (a big book—more than eight hundred pages of text with forty pages of notes) winds up in a separate room. The structural flaw of this otherwise formidable achievement is that Menand provides no way for these rooms to open into each other and communicate.What the book lacks as a comprehensive argument it makes up for by the variety and clarity of its descriptions, hundreds of them, of the artists, thinkers, works, performers, and critics of the period of time that Menand covers. That period is even more extensive than the Cold War; it reaches back as far as the late nineteenth century. And while Menand's coverage is impressively wide (with extended portraits, for instance, of Jasper Johns, Elvis Presley, Bonnie and Clyde, Susan Sontag, John Cage, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Beatles, Pauline Kael, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and Betty Friedan), to put so much in, without telling why, is to prompt the obvious question: why leave so much out? Why not Alfred Hitchcock, Milton Berle, James Brown, Elia Kazan, Charles Van Doren, Ayn Rand, Herman Wouk, Joan Baez, I. F. Stone, The Manchurian Candidate, Arthur Miller, Marlon Brando, Milton Friedman, and Leonard Bernstein? Why so much painting and avant-garde music yet no drama, no professional sports, and why almost no national politics, elections, Cuban missile crisis, or TV dinners? Adlai Stevenson represented himself as an intellectual during the Cold War. He appears only fleetingly in the book. Herman Kahn, strategist and systems theorist of the Cold War, does not appear at all. Buckminster Fuller, inventor and futurist, receives two mentions, just as many as Fats Domino. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA in the Fifties, is mentioned only once. Joseph McCarthy gets less notice than the movie critic Jonas Mekas. I do not mean to fault what Menand includes, but only to inquire into the rules governing inclusion. Not everything can be embraced in even so large a book as this one. Nonetheless, the principles by which this has been described and that has been neglected deserve explanation by the explainer himself.Indeed, what is the “culture” examined by Menand? He says that his book is not about the “cultural Cold War” (cultural policy as diplomatic policy), nor about “Cold War culture” (art and ideas as ideology). But if it is not these things, what is it? He elsewhere mentions that his focus is on “cultural change in which the existence of the Cold War was a constant, but only one of many contexts.” Adding to the methodological tangle, he asserts that he is not writing a “history of ideas,” but instead “intellectual history,” a genre that explains “art and ideas by examining the conditions of their production and reception.” Summing up his approach, he says the book is “a little like a novel with a hundred characters,” and he claims that “the dots do connect.” But it is the reader, not the author, who is left to find ways to make the necessary connections in a book animated by so many ambitions.If there is no clear principle of inclusion, there is instead a tone with which each artist, thinker, or other luminary of the time is treated. The descriptions are thorough but the tone is superior. It combines ironic distance and subtly mild amusement. Very few subjects escape such scrutiny. If there is a great deal to learn from this book, there is little prompting to admire anyone in it. But Menand makes a few exceptions. Standing almost alone in the book are three individuals—George Kennan, George Orwell, and Lionel Trilling—whose detachment, intellect, and posture of superiority give them a status and authority equal to Menand's own. The book begins with Kennan and ends with him. Menand admires him for his judgment about the actual, rather than the imaginary, dangers of the Soviet Union and praises him for his bravery in insisting, early on, that the war in Vietnam would irreparably damage the United States. Orwell simply told the truth at all times about every political siren call and sought a language shorn of every distortion. Trilling, a liberal, exposed the muddled comforts of liberalism and thought all ideological formations misjudged humanity's essential “residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control.” These three men—skeptical, realistic, and independent—stand as the lonely monitors of the landscape Menand surveys. They act, collectively, to suggest the kind of focus and axis needed in this informative and engaging book.